The Cure for Cancer Is Data–Mountains of Data

October 19, 2016

(Wired) – For a decade we’ve been talking about the potential of gene sequencing and personalized medicine, how advances in computer processing power combined with an increasingly intimate understanding of our individual genomes has put us on the threshold of an age of miracles. With enough data, the theory goes, there’s not a disease that isn’t druggable. But as Schadt has learned, it’s not enough to plumb the depths of an individual’s DNA. It requires a universe of data—exabytes worth—to detect patterns in a population, apply machine learning, find the network of mutations responsible for disease, and do something about it. The bigger these data sets become, the more accurate and powerful the models and the predictors become.

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